Stratigraphy of a Random Acyclic Directed Graph: The Size of Trophic Levels in the Cascade Model
Luczak, Tomasz ; Cohen, Joel E.
Ann. Appl. Probab., Tome 3 (1993) no. 4, p. 403-420 / Harvested from Project Euclid
When an ecological food web is described by an acyclic directed graph, the trophic level of a species of plant or animal may be described by the length of the shortest (or the longest) food chain from the species to a green plant or to a top predator. Here we analyze the number of vertices in different levels in a stochastic model of acyclic directed graphs called the cascade model. This model describes several features of real food webs. For an acyclic directed graph $D$, define the $i$th lower (upper) level as the set of all vertices $\nu$ of $D$ such that the length of the shortest (longest) maximal path starting from $\nu$ equals $i, i = 0, 1\cdots$. In this article, we compute the sizes of the levels of a random digaph $D(n, c)$ obtained from a random graph on the set $\{1, 2,\cdots,n\}$ of vertices in which each edge appears independently with probability $c/n$, by directing all edges from a larger vertex to a smaller one. The number of edges between any two levels of $D(n, c)$ is also found.
Publié le : 1993-05-14
Classification:  Digraph,  acyclic,  random graph,  food web,  trophic level,  05C80,  05C20,  92D40
@article{1177005431,
     author = {Luczak, Tomasz and Cohen, Joel E.},
     title = {Stratigraphy of a Random Acyclic Directed Graph: The Size of Trophic Levels in the Cascade Model},
     journal = {Ann. Appl. Probab.},
     volume = {3},
     number = {4},
     year = {1993},
     pages = { 403-420},
     language = {en},
     url = {http://dml.mathdoc.fr/item/1177005431}
}
Luczak, Tomasz; Cohen, Joel E. Stratigraphy of a Random Acyclic Directed Graph: The Size of Trophic Levels in the Cascade Model. Ann. Appl. Probab., Tome 3 (1993) no. 4, pp.  403-420. http://gdmltest.u-ga.fr/item/1177005431/